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Lexicality and Optimizability

Traditional optimizations in compilers rely on compile-time knowledge about the program. Usually statically typed langauges like Java and C are rather good at that, and dynamic languages like Perl 5, ruby and python are not.

Perl 6 offers the flexibility of dynamic languages, but tries to provide much optimizability nonetheless by gradual typing, that is offering optional static type annotations.

But even in the presence of type annotations, another piece is needed for compile time dispatch decision and inlining: the knowledge about the available routines (and in the case of multi subs, the available candidates).

To provide that knowledge, Perl 6 installs subroutine in lexical scopes (and not packages / symbol tables, as in Perl 5), and lexical scopes are immutable at run time. (Variables inside the lexical scopes are still mutable, you just cannot add or remove entries at run time).

To provide the necessary flexibility, Perl 6 allows code to run at compile time. A typical way to run code at compile time is with the use directive:

{
use Test; # imports routines into the current
# lexical scope, at compile time
plan 1;
ok 1, 'success';
}
# plan() and ok() are not available here,
# outside the scope into which the routines has been imported to.

The upside is that a sufficiently smart compiler can complain before runtime about missing routines and dispatches that are bound to fail. Current Rakudo does that, though there are a certainly cases that rakudo does not detect yet, but which are possible to detect.

Since built-in routines are provided in an outer scope to the user’s program, all built-in routines are automatically subjected to all the same rules and optimizations as user-provided routines.

Note that this has other implications: require, which loads modules at run time, now needs a list of symbols to stub in at compile time, which are later wired up to the symbols loaded from the module.

The days are past where "a sufficiently smart compiler" was a legend; these days we have a compiler that can provide measurable speed-ups. There is still room for improvements, but we are now seeing the benefits from static knowledge and lexical scoping.